Slushpile 18

Tis the season, the season of slush.  I'm pretty sure this is the biggest one yet.

Slushpile Index

1. Salt in food has made it much harder for demons to possess people
2. The division of first beings into those who have no part in the world, those who devote all things to maintaining it, those who take an active role within it
3. A recurring question in medieval Christianity:  “Did Christ also die for the orcs?”
4. Trial by ordeal but it's just making the arrest: if she was actually an evil witch you'd be dead the moment you cross the property line, so no need to toss her in a lake.
5. The spell to turn one’s spirit into a banshee is a secret art of women - a practice of last-ditch defence against men who wish them harm.
6. The cult had fallen out of practice well before the arrival of the Four Prophets and the Epistles of Fire, and so very little information remains.
7. The Twelve Houses of Balosar
8. Oberon’s Tower hostel, just outside Lang-Mer’s Poor Gate.
9. Kona Hafhandsdottir - A sword for hire, from the northern fjordlands.
10. Makhan - A mendicant sword-priest from the lands beyond Prester John’s country.
11. “Here is one thing, there another. The stone has ten thousand teachers.”
12. Drow Ambassador: “Yes, yes, I’ve seen the cartoons. Your political comics are men of unparalleled creativity: who could have possibly imagined such witticisms as ‘foreigner bad’ or ‘woman stupid’? If that’s the best they can do I don't think they're paying much attention.”
13. Atlantida: volcanic island off the northern coast of Brazil. Former Portuguese colony.
14. “It’s all in the Vibe. Gotta have the ineffable sauce.”
15. “I am very tired and want to go home. In a cosmological sense.”
16. “There can be no Eden without gardeners, without those who love rich soil and clean water and old, old trees. It cannot be built nor sustained without callused hands and tired feet, without aching back and nails blackened with dirt. Perhaps the only difference between heaven and hell is whether the day’s labor ends with satisfaction or despair."
17. Dwarves associated with Hades / Pluto because of underground wealth.
18. DOVER BATHOS has remained at Anomalous Organism Storage Facility 05 since 1998.
19. Wherever the polyps emerged, they began to build enormous, hivelike arcologies of stone.
20. "Because they are alive, and we are not.”
21. Dream: Kittan’s youngest sister from TTGL shirts SHUT UP MOON MAN to the tune of Rob Zombie's “living dead girl”.
22. Martin had sworn to himself that he’d throw the next reporter to mention Sapir-Whorf out the nearest window, mostly in jest and frustration, and not sixteen hours later he was asked by a man from Scientific General if language dictated thought. He didn’t throw the reporter out the window, but he definitely wanted to, in a harmless, cartoon-physics sort of way.
23. Action / reaction / willpower (resist mental) / toughness (resist body)
24. Lost/anomalous media: medieval manuscript marginalia of Homestar characters
25. Dream: There is a basilosaurus in the lake, though it’s more of a nuisance than a danger.
26. To the king, that which cannot be enslaved - cannot be made property - must be destroyed. Seven hundred princes pledged allegiance to his banner, and his war parties returned to the palace so laden with treasure that they would break the backs of the pack mules.
27. Lothlorien is beautiful because the trees were loved (if only they loved their neighbors half as much, the pricks)
28. Anime that don’t exist: Grotty cult-classic sci-fi OVA, major MoSh fuel.
29. While translated as “mother”, the term is typically un gendered, and refers to anyone with the primary role of caring for and teaching a creche.
30. “You shall have your vengeance, but you shall not become it.”
31. Ribbon I want to do for convention Mothership games: “I died alone in space”
32. If magic is a beam of light, a rite is a series of focusing lenses that directs it through the prism of some unlucky bastard
33.  An anomalous transmission from the Voyager 1 spacecraft beginning November 18 2023. Situation is developing and under observation. 
34. …slipping out of the knotted dead-ends of time space when there is food to be had and the brane is thin…
35. The Door in the Wall
36. Alternate stat names: athletic aptitude, fast action, book smarts, street smarts, people skills
37. Missives from the Future: Transtemporal Stochastic Terrorism and its Effects on American Society (Jemison, 2025)
38. “Ganymede STC this is Oriole on final approach” “Copy that, Oriole, you’re cleared for docking, spur 4, bay 12.”
39. Laying on a straw mattress, listening to the crickets outside
40. Affix designating loanwords / phonetic spelling
41. “May this worthless blade be driven into a plowshare.”
42. Three common demons: guilt, despair, addiction
43. The etymology for cannabis is extremely murky, as it turns out. Heroditus claims it was from the Scythians, so you should give it to the amazons in your setting, at least.
44. If Lovecraft or one of his imitators had written the Red Pool, there would have been a character proclaiming without evidence that it was the spilled blood of Yog-Sothoth. This is a bad example because that's a fucking rad idea.
45. Generic Vernacular Fantasyland as alternate / echoed version of early 400s Britain; post Roman withdrawal (+ancient ruins), beginning of Angle-Saxon migrations / invasions (+orc stand-ins)
46. Planet where entire population descended from emulations of very limited original colonist population
47. Su’amatsanidan - I think this is supposed to gloss as “abstract mother-ship-person”, so it’s probably a term for a personified spaceship.
48. The Dust House / ANTIPETRICHOR
49. Radio in the kitchen: Preset stations pick up [spooky things]
50. 60 Years ecophage threats adapted for DG or MoSh.
51. Angga - paleolithic shamaness, maybe Willendorf herself
52. A priest of Mantuka, Devourer-of-Demons: More like a mountain that walks than a man
53. The Headhunters are not conscious - they are investigating humans primarily because self-awareness should have killed us a long time ago. We are an anomaly. Their experiments leave behind entire planets of human-derived livestock
54. Spec evo seed world but can only use SCP articles tagged with some sort of life form (animal, plant, fungus, species, etc) (or otherwise describe a clade of organisms)
55. DG agent: Sr. Margaret Tan - ~50 years old, small build, blue windbreaker, shotgun.
56. Morale is low: it is dark, and cold, and I would like to rest
57. The mosaic empire of the elves across the northern desert
58. A Lot of Zeroes premise I want to use: after detection of an alien megastructure, my spaceship is sent to panspermia the trail between it and Sol. 
59. Baqwoman - a title / profession
60. The sagani may take up divine mantles, but they do so by a different path than men.
61. The human/sapient prefix can be applied to non-sapient things as a personifier; different cultures will extend this to different things - ships, ainimae, exoselves.
62. Conlang idea - the language of Hole / Throne: the fossilized court of azathoth. Uses kanji and also Cherokee syllabary?
63. Dorothy, Alice, Lirazel vs John Carter’s invasion force; Carter overestimates how easy it is to return to earth gravity.
64. “He has need for neither posturing nor for glory: He’s going to kill a motherfucker and be done with it.”
65.  Δ-Class Citizen: colonial population support program (clone body, soul tether sigils)
66. You ever think about that bit in the tartakovsky clone wars where the Nelvaani kid recognizes and accepts his father despite his father having been turned into a monster?
67. The Eldest of Elders (Elden Beast) = transapient Elder Thing conglomerate (can embody in an avatar-body);   The binding ring (Elden Ring) = shoggoth tree-of-life command & control function.
68. Neanderthal body found frozen in permafrost, sufficiently preserved that a genome can be sequenced by porting in leftovers in modern humans.
69. CAPRA - Civic Anomalous Phenomena Response Agency 
70. Elephant variants: miniature, stilt, extremely colorful, rooter/tusker, many trunks 
71. Corvid variants: sun thief / golden-head raven, carnivale (parrot-like), thunderers, neoraptors
72. Cetacean variants: neo-ambulocetus, cyborg / walker-bots, whalesong-possessed humans, skywhales
73. Octopi variants: gasbag, shelled 
74. Paraphrasing cosmicorrery: A word to describe the feeling of sadness when one sees activities, games, or decorations put together in attempt to be Fun go unused, ignored, or dismissed. 
75. Cheap & easy conlang idea: take Latin then apply sound changes of P-Celtic to Old Irish, or take P-Celtic and apply sound changes of Latin to French or Occitan.
76. Via Robwords' episode on the etymology of dog: there are medeival English records that mention men named Wilfric Pig, Willelmo Hog, Roger le Doge, William le Frogge.
77. Extremely important historical fact: there were riots against the Inquisition in Carcassonne ~1300. The module writes itself!
78. Via Black Forager: Racahout - ground acorns in milk, a pre-chocolate hot chocolate
79. Echidna as mother of monsters but also progenitor of humanity
80. DG shotgun scenario: Inventory Day - Program agents are tasked with taking inventory at the Book Depository (old missile silo?), a long-term storage facility for weird shit. Naturally, among all the recovered Green Boxes, there is something horrible and unexpected.
81. “I attract strange people like honey attracts flies. There could be a talking monkey at my door and it wouldn’t be surprising.” 
82. The Spear of Lu - At forty-one confirmed kills, she is one of the most-veteran ships in the OSMAT fleets. 
83. The Pentaregia of Sigma Draconis
84. Demons that induce the sin vs demons that embody the sin as discrete orders of demon
85. Conjuration of spirits used to bypass development of scientific experimentation, because you can just ask a thing how it works.
86. Firebird units: Burner / Phoenix / Militia / Fireteam / Burnout
87. Courtly romance (n): wholly divorced from human experience, it contains no elements of an actual relationship and mostly serves as justification for men with power to cheat on their spouses. Guinevere never has to deal with Lancelot thrashing around in bed because of his PTSD dreams. 
88. Via Just King Things: M. John Harrison said that the editorial choice that saved his horror story The Ice Monkey was going back, removing the exposition, and keeping everything else intact.
89. In an effort to save the library from the encroaching polyps, a large chunk of the time space superstructure is violently torn out of reality. Some ruins are left behind, discovered so much later by the troodontids and humans. The yithians regroup in the distant future. Those that remain inside, unable to transmigrate or continue a population of conomorphs, attempt to develop other hosts. While they succeed, their minds are reduced to instinct, and these new docents tend to tomes they can neither read nor understand.
90. The triple hierophant - a towering exultant; long straight black hair, golden robes that appear to glow, headpiece like a sunburst
91. Idea: What if the existence of working conjuring means that you can kind of sidestep a lot of experimental science by just asking something "how do you work?"
92. You'd think that by this point goblins should would know to avoid adventurers
93. The problem with “work to live, not live to work” is that it still contains the unspoken and implicit corollary of “and those who don’t work, don’t get to live.”
94. FTL that autocorrects for paradoxes by removing the vessel from perception from all frames of reference. One it jumps it is fucking gone
95. Demon that causes miscarriages as male, bucking folkloric trend
96. Demon: A white bull ox ridden by a giant, blood-drenched man bound in hair-ropes. Blinded, cock like a flagpole
97. Appalachian Tsathoggua: I can't explain why it feels right, but it does.
98. Stealthy night monster identified by the sound of its grinding teeth
99. Lemman - Middle English word for one's lover, from Old English lēof +‎ mann. Gender neutral. We could stand to bring this one back, it's very useful. (Thanks to the Maniculum for pointing it out.)  
100. Goldberg polyhedrons: a sphere made of hexes, which is probably useful to y'all.
101. Language where the word for "wealthy" shares the same root as the word for fat.
102. I remember an old LP of Jurassic Park Trespasser that I enjoyed, really need to find it again. Old old, like definitely over a decade.
103. "Forgiveness is not transactional! Mercy is not a fucking gacha machine you can just feed tokens into until what you did is okay!"
104. For MoSh: Marines get sidearm, Teamsters get toolkit, Scientists get research database, Androids get logic core
105. Tostées dorées - French toast, when you're already in France.
106. Slimes are dragon vomit, containing bits and pieces of inedible matter like an owl pellet.
107. Runaway Station; phantom train stop that appears to a quartet of kids who have fled the residential school. 
108. Sour Stripes ? Sour Strips? Google gives me candy but I swear that was the name of the band.
109. Everyone goes for “oh the necronomicon is bound in human skin” and no one bothers asking “okay, whose skin is it? Seems like a lot of trouble. And honestly how can they even tell, it's leather! It is leather, right? It'd be rotting away if it wasn't..."
110. Japanese "starving woman" cryptid
111. Gravity was formulated relatively early, thanks to a monastic order high in the mountains, whose meditative practices involved rolling polished stone balls onto a taut sheet of silk or canvas that was shaped into a funnel by a central stone, and divining according to how the balls spiraled. 
112. Via Dr. Sledge: in Talmudic demonology, Shabiri / Shabriri (I couldn't discern if that first r was there when he said it) is the demon of night-blindness. Fair to assume that Miyazaki did that intentionally.
113. Knight errant as the fantasy of “get the cool parts of the military estate without the feudalism”
114. Lawful demons tempt into sin; chaotic demons embody it 
115. “The Knight” or “”The Lord”; an undead or possessed suit of armor to defend the town 
116. Combative magic is difficult and rare because most spirits will just refuse to do it 
117. A language: SVO, analytic. It possesses no tense but sufficient aspect
118. The sin of Power, combining within itself cruelty, greed, and pride
119. Video game Sea of Rifts uses "Exposure" instead of stability / insight / sanity, and I think I like it best of all. You don't understand it, but you're changed all the same. 
120. The angel corpse falls to seafloor and is covered with silts; geological upraising of the region, plus hundreds of millions of years of erosion, will lead to its discovery inside a mountain.

**

RED HED

A withered body, bluish-grey like colloidal silver poisoning. A swollen rubbery sphere, candy apple red and six feet across, grows out of its head, hanging in the air like a water balloon pulled by an unseen center of gravity high above. Its splay-toed feet are on backwards.

• Wounds: 2(20)
• Instinct: 40
• Combat: Non-Continguous Cutting Motion (30)
• Line-of-sight
• Seven-fingered hands and three-jointed arms snap into a sequence of angular contortions. Flesh is cut with the knife that is not.
• On failure: 3d10 damage, SAN save to negate
• One success: 1 wound (Blade), SAN save to reduce to failure result.

Ambrosia
The heavy, non-Newtonian fluid within the acephalonic sac is highly alkaline. It splashes over everything at Close range, damaging objects and burning exposed skin (1d10/round). Poison fumes burn eyes, mouth, nose; anyone who comes within Close range without eye protection will be temporarily blinded. Can be diluted with (large quantities of) water. Reacts with violent foaming reaction if acid is applied.

**

“Hi! My name’s Luce!”

Miriam looked at the girl on the doorstep and wondered for a moment why the last twenty-odd years of her life were regularly punctuated by the strangest people imaginable. She brushed the thought aside: the girl with blue hair was not nearly as strange as the talking monkey and confused monk, or the clay doves, or the choir of burning eyes, or the stone-bodied messenger, or any number of impossible things that seemed to follow her like dust on her heels.

“Are you lost?” Miriam asked.

“I’m on pilgrimage!” The girl said, beaming. “But I don’t know if I’m in the right place. So maybe I am lost.”

Miriam nodded. That made more sense.

“If you’re looking for Yeshua, he’s out with his brothers on a job. He’ll be back by sundown.”

**

 “You are so very concerned with whether things are real and care nothing for if they are true. When I woke up this morning, I went into the woods and pissed on a tree. That is real. If I tell the story of Chukan and how he tried to steal the sun’s wedding garment for his beloved, is it less true because I do not include every time he stopped and pissed against a tree? What bearing does that have on the story of a youth in the grips of lovesickness? The sun does not have garments, and even if he did, they would be far too large.” [Footnote: this size discrepancy is brought up in most versions of the story]

** 

Principle of Anthropocentic Expectation

It is always possible that a supernatural entity, either on their own or through external influence, is, artificially adjusting their appearance, properties, or circumstances so as to align with pre-existing human expectations; this may be embodied in tropes such as “people see what they think they should see” or “they picked this form because it was already familiar”, or it may be an intentional misdirection on the part of the supernatural entity.

** 

 

Please get these drafts out of my docs they have been sitting here for YEARS. 

 

Scrap Post 1: Making Better Transhuman Chargen

(Initially) an attempt to fix Eclipse Phase’s wonky morph system, that then turned into a broad sketch for a fully modular Knave-style slot-based build-a-character system.

Reason to Scrap It: The premise is so broad that my attempt to make a general-purpose system floundered (turns out, transhuman sci-fi is an extremely broad conceptual category) and I’d have to make an entire setting to give it anything substantial to work on, and I don’t enough about the idea to go to that work. I might dig it back

Scrap Post 2: Building the Verse (but Better)

Taking the oddly detailed numbers of Firefly’s Verse, plus some help from PlanetPlanet, and rebuilding the setting with some hard-science solar system generator or another for a slightly-more-realistic version.

Reason to Scrap It: The map is the only thing I particularly like about Firefly and while the numbers are useful, I’d need to re-arrange the system anyway to make it stable and at that point why not just make it wholly original.

 

Scrapped Post 3: Building a Fantasy Solar System

Either a collection of tables, an essay, or a worked example (or all three) to do what it said in the title.

Reason to Scrap It: Not enough substantial material to justify it as a standalone post. I still want to do something with the idea, since I am a fan of that tiny tiny Venn overlap of high fantasy and hard space science that basically no one else lives in, but if I do I'm going to just skip ahead to “making a solar system”. Probably for MSF, though the advantage of this method is that you can kinda just swap it into whatever setting because so few fantasy RPGs care about other planets.